Does anyone imagine that Osama bin Laden isn’t laughing insanely at the idea of young Arab children sitting in their living rooms watching images of American GIs fighting Muslims in the streets of Iraq?
Could Osama bin Laden possibly share the Bush administration’s excitement about regime change in Iraq? After all, it’s the only way Islamic militancy stands a chance of taking hold in that country in ways that it never could under Hussein’s iron-fisted secular dictatorship. Hussein has been stepping on bin Laden’s Iraqi Muslim brothers for more than 30 years.
Bin Laden set the trap, and think-tank refugees from the American Enterprise Institute walked U.S. troops into it.
While serving in the first Bush White House 12 years ago, current administration officials and advisers Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Donald Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and William Kristol developed a foreign policy doctrine that called for using unilateral U.S. force to pre-empt perceived threats to U.S. dominance and make the Middle East safe for democracy. Glaringly absent from this list is Colin Powell, the only current top administration official who served his country in Vietnam.
When the first President Bush saw the plan, the experienced diplomat, former CIA chief and World War II combat veteran threw it into the Oval Office trash can like a rotten piece of okra. It was considered too costly in lost American lives, plundered economic resources and ruined international relationships. It also risked a huge potential for backfiring.
It’s now about 18 months after Sept. 11, 2001, and the pre-emption doctrine has been dug up, dusted off and is being implemented in the guise of protecting American citizens from an Arab regime that has never convincingly been linked to the Sept. 11 attacks. Iraq is a country that our own CIA believes poses no imminent threat.
This doctrine is now being promoted through a “non-profit educational organization” called “The Project for the New American Century.” Signers to this plan include Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Steve Forbes, Dick Cheney and Dan Quayle. Check out their frightening conclusions at www.newamericancentury.org.
We wish the best to the innocent Iraqi civilians and America’s brave fighting men and women, most of whom come from the working-class and minority communities that President George W. Bush flies over on his way to his sprawling Texas ranch or his family’s Connecticut vacation compound.
But support for the troops is an invalid justification for stifling dissent. Michael Moore “outraged” some Americans with his comments at the Oscars. But did anyone catch the painful irony on TV the very next evening? While military-age “First Cousin” Billy Bush hosted the Miss USA Pageant on NBC, another network was broadcasting footage of GIs fighting for their lives and being taken prisoner in Iraq.
Some might find that glaring inequality of duty to country more offensive than a “Pope-and-Dixie Chicks” potshot launched at the president.
Remember: “These Colors Never Run.” But our president used family connections to hide in the relative safety of the Texas Air National Guard while his less-well-connected peers were fighting, killing and dying for their country in Vietnam; now he and a group of overreaching ideologues (all of whom had their own excuses for avoiding the Vietnam draft) have sent a new generation of America’s finest to fight overseas in the name of another misguided political “domino” theory.
Too bad that won’t fit neatly on a jingoistic
bumper sticker.